Winter Walk Collaborative Painting

 

Two weeks ago we had an opportunity to make a collaborative project for an area school art show exhibit. The exhibit was at the Hudson Opera House, and the opening was the evening of Winter Walk.  Literally thousands take to the streets of Hudson, and many visit the Opera House as they are the ones who put together the Winter Walk.  If you travel to a back room and look up on the wall, there is our lovely group painting.  We even won an award!

 

The thing I found most impressive about this painting created by the children is that they all worked together on it, but also the layers of colors, and materials, that came together in a very captivating and free way.

I tried to offer the children their favorite art processes to work with.

So we first started off with spray bottle painting.  They also layered cardboard cut outs on the canvas to leave the impression of these shapes after they spray painted.

 

After spray painting for some time, I took out another favorite of the kids and that is using watered down acrylic paints and eye droppers.

Here is what the painting looked like after the first day.

Later some of the children used a hot glue gun with white crayons in instead of glue.

They used the wax to draw an outline around some of the shapes made from the cardboard cutouts.

On another day the children layered tissue paper all over the canvas and then used water

in eyedroppers to make the colors from the tissue paper bleed onto the canvas.  This added another layer of color and dimension.

Continuing through the week, our next group did printmaking on the painting using rollers and stamps.

For one of the last layers the children sprinkled broken crayon bits and

beeswax on the canvas and then using a tacking iron they melted the wax onto the painting.

some drew into the melted wax.

And for the final touch they added mirror sticker to the painting.

Here it is hanging at the Opera House.

At the preschool age I feel the process is more important than the product, however the end product that came out of their process has an organic, beautiful finale that I just love and cannot wait to hang in the school.